The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  Rodrigo ignored him. “All you need to add is a little paprika and some salt; otherwise you’re masking the flavor.” Eduardo raised his glass to the air in a silent toast of solidarity as Rodrigo pushed on. “Look, when a great leg is born, and we get to raising it, Placido’s eight-year-old niece could make a delicious ham!”

  Placido smiled uncomfortably. He leaned over to me as Rodrigo continued speaking about the importance of raising pigs the right way. “Not exactly. Give her forty-five years to learn, and all the right weather conditions, and yeah, sure . . . it’s easy.”

  The color of the jamón was very near to purple, and even more marbled than the piece Eduardo had held up at the bar in Monesterio. Miguel handed me a piece with extra fat and told me to hold it in my hand. Unlike the fat from a Berkshire pig, the kind we cure at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, it began to melt right away. “Seventy percent of that fat is unsaturated,” he said. “These pigs are like an olive tree on four legs.”

  I let the fat melt on my tongue for a moment before swallowing. Its aroma was distinct, incredibly nutty and aromatic. I felt as though I was tasting the jamón equivalent of Bordeaux’s finest, the Lafite Rothschild of hams. And yet my surroundings spoke nothing of luxury. The tasting room was dark and musty. Cigarette smoke wafted through the air. We drank warm beer in plastic cups. The jamón was on simple white plates, piled on and hastily arranged. While the ham was delicious, it was also a little dry—a minor complaint, maybe, but true.

  I turned around and saw the jamón in the tong. The man slicing was cutting near the bone, struggling to remove whole pieces intact. We were sampling the very last of the leg. It had been cut into dozens of times, probably over many weeks, if not months. Another leg rested nearby, untouched and at the ready in case anyone wanted more.

  The expression on my face must have given me away. Miguel tapped me on the leg. “This is exactly the point,” he said quietly, waving his arm around the room as everyone laughed and drank beer. “The life he leads—he looks and he acts like a peasant farmer. It’s not the picture of riches, but I’m telling you he’s very rich. And I’m also telling you that Juan Carlos himself could come to visit here, and if there was still meat on an old jamón, that’s what they would serve. Because jamón is not about luxury. It’s a poor product; it comes from poor land. I believe this is why it has survived.”

  RETURN TO A ROOFTOP

  We finished the tour on the rooftop, which was where I finally got that bird’s-eye view of the dehesa’s pastoral scene.

  Placido’s distinctively Mediterranean home rose out of the ground like the ancient oaks surrounding us, towering over the family’s property. It was such a clear day you could see for miles. Eduardo quickly walked to the corners of the roof and again cupped his hands in front of his eyes like binoculars. He was looking for geese. I was looking for pigs, but instead I saw a cluster of veal calves grazing in the field. I asked if the pigs followed the cattle on the grass.

  “This is Spain,” Miguel said. “Pigs don’t follow anything. They lead.”

  That was an understatement. To ensure an abundant supply of acorns for their binges, each pig requires about four acres of dehesa—sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the acorns available in a particular season. During a below-average acorn year, the number of pigs allowed to fatten is restricted. It keeps the price of the best jamón ibérico high, but it also acts as a kind of insurance against overwhelming the balance of the dehesa.

  Without the pigs moving, Placido explained, the grasses between the trees would suffer. Pigs eat just some of the grass, a collateral feast on their way to the next targeted acorn tree. It’s the cattle—who follow just behind the pigs—that do the real grazing. After all, they’re herbivores, and they happily trail the pigs and eat what the pigs have overlooked. The same is true of the sheep. While they no longer make up the dominant industry (and are not included on Placido’s farm), sheep are still scattered around the low-lying areas of the dehesa. They eat leftovers, the grasses the pigs and the cattle don’t want or can’t get to on account of the size of their mouths.

  Like at Stone Barns, all that grazing actually improves the grass. Spread out, the manure from the animals fertilizes the field. The trampling of the hooves—whether it’s sheep or cattle or pigs—also helps break down materials such as fallen leaves. Returned to the ground, that organic matter helps to sustain the billions of soil organisms and conspires to make the famously delicious assortment of grasses. It’s the variety that’s key to the health of the animals, and to the larger ecosystem. All that grass diversity increases the numbers of butterflies, beetles, ants, and bumblebees, which in turn supports the animals that prey on those insects, like lizards and snakes.

  The thick forest stretches I saw in the distance provide habitats for wild birds. They flourish here, too—red kites, booted eagles, and short-toed eagles all provide a built-in population control for insects and rodents. They’re also integral to seed dispersal in the dehesa. In their hunt for grubs and insects, they’ll peck at the manure left behind by an herbivore, spreading it across the field and helping it to fertilize more efficiently, which means healthier pastures the next time the pigs come around to graze the grass.

  Herein lies an essential fact about the famous jamón ibérico: it’s not just about jamón, in the same way that tierra isn’t just about the thing you stand on.

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” Miguel said to me. “What you realize looking out from up here is very obvious, and it’s something most of the world has yet to realize: jamón ibérico is just one product of the dehesa.”

  He named two rich sheep’s-milk cheeses from the area: the Torta del Casar, with its gamy, acidic, and somewhat smoky flavor, widely distributed throughout Spain, and La Serena, considered one of the finest sheep’s-milk cheeses in the world. Both cheeses are made from the milk of Merino sheep. (Merinos are not much of a milking breed—the yield is particularly low—but the sheep were so integral to the culture of southern Spain and the health of the dehesa system that when the price of wool fell, milk replaced the wool.) But, to Miguel’s point, I had never known that they were products of the dehesa.

  Miguel pointed to the cows, a relatively unknown Morucha breed, which he said might be more flavorful than any beef in America. The Moruchas were once used as fighting bulls (Ferdinand, of the beloved children’s book, is the most famous example), and since they originated from Black Iberian cattle, they’ve evolved to forage in the dehesa. The cattle are constantly in motion, which, just as with the Iberian pigs, oxygenates the muscles and yields bold, flavorful meat, darker than most steaks.

  At the mention of Morucha beef, Eduardo made a tight fist and brought it to his lips. “Fantastico,” he said, wincing at the thought that I had never tasted it.

  “There’s a history of poor communication and a lack of modern commercial networks in this area of Spain in particular,” Miguel continued, explaining that these products aren’t well-known because they’ve historically been produced for personal consumption. “That’s all changing now. You need only to look at yourself as an example. Here you are discovering Eduardo’s foie gras, but Eduardo’s foie gras is a very old thing.”

  I asked what else provided an economy for the dehesa, and they pointed to the oak trees. “Not the acorns, but the cork. That’s really the economic engine of this whole system,” Miguel said. Stripping the bark without harming the trees is a highly skilled task, done with extraordinary precision. Peeled like bananas, the dark orange trunks are a familiar sight after harvesting. Nearly a quarter of all wine corks in the world originate in the dehesa.

  Placido pointed to the more open areas in the distance where barley, oats, and rye were grown—for animal feed but also for the table. “I wouldn’t say this is a highly profitable undertaking. The land is suited more for grazing. But we do produce grain, and it cuts down on what we have to import for feed.”

 
Dissecting the open pastures were thick forest stretches, thinned appropriately for charcoal production—another “industry” I didn’t know existed here. And the most surprising feature of the landscape—the homes scattered throughout, the hanging laundry, and the sounds of children playing in the distance—seemed just as central to the scene as the cork and the pigs.

  Wendell Berry once described the land as an “immeasurable gift,” and he wasn’t just referring to food. In the rush to industrialize farming, we’ve lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity. What Berry refers to as the culture in agriculture is as integral to the process as the soil or the sun. Here in the dehesa, culture and agriculture seemed not only intertwined but interchangeable.

  I’m sometimes asked what is meant by sustainable agriculture. I’ve never arrived at an easy answer.

  When I was on that panel with Wes Jackson in California several years ago (before he schooled me in the root systems of perennial and annual wheat), Wes was asked for examples of sustainable farming. He didn’t offer any.

  “Small societies have pulled it off here and there, but it has been beyond the cultural stretch of most of humanity to do agriculture right century after century,” he said, his words injecting the room with an air of defeat. “Thinking of agriculture as a mistake is a good place to start.” Wes’s work to make agriculture perennial—mimicking natural ecosystems like the prairie—is intended to remove annual planting decisions, and thereby the wild card of human shortsightedness.

  At dinner that evening, I told Wes about Klaas and Mary-Howell. I described their conversion to organic, the complex rotations for soil fertility, the propagation of ancient varieties of wheat—everything pointing to farming’s potential to do a lot of good. “What’s not sustainable about that kind of agriculture?” I asked him.

  “Because it won’t last,” he said. “Klaas sounds great. His son might prove to be even better. But sooner or later someone is going to show up and do something stupid to degrade the land. That’s been the history of agriculture.”

  An organic farmer like Klaas might be important and inspiring, and he might produce delicious food while improving the fertility of his soil. But don’t call him sustainable, said Wes. Biologically speaking, he is more like a historical blip: here today, gone tomorrow. (“What can I say?” he said. “We live in a fallen world.”)

  In the last few minutes on the roof at Cárdeno, I stood near the edge and looked out at the dehesa. The afternoon sun remained hidden behind a thick curtain of clouds. Then, just as we were leaving, a spectacular flood of light splashed across the fields. Once again, I saw the entirety of the astonishingly diverse landscape. But what struck me wasn’t the diversity so much as the permanence of the scene. I was enjoying the same view that Placido’s grandfather enjoyed. It was, when I stopped to think about it, the same view that Placido’s grandfather’s grandfather enjoyed, which was enough to call Wes’s conviction into question. A two-thousand-year-old agricultural landscape isn’t a blip.

  The dehesa has survived (thrived, even) despite its poverty. In fact, as Miguel argued, the dehesa’s survival may be because of its poverty.

  “The land of Ibérico was a poor part of Spain until just the last few decades,” he told me. “Understanding and respecting nature was not a choice, but the rule to survive.”

  Unlike American settlers, who were spoiled by our country’s natural abundance, Spaniards couldn’t simply drop their plow and move on to better land. Agribusiness never capitalized on the dehesa’s wealth because the land isn’t quite good enough.*

  But the impoverished land is only part of the story. For a place to produce such remarkable products, including jamón ibérico, and for a semiarid region to hold on to its remarkable biodiversity—so high it has been compared to that of a tropical rainforest—my rooftop view couldn’t fully explain the embarrassment of riches, nor why the riches have endured.

  I thought back to John Muir, and his statement that “when we try to pick out anything by itself” in nature, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That much was clear even from the rooftop. Remove, say, the sheep from grazing and the pigs would begin to feed on denuded grass. Eventually the jamón would change, too.*

  But how these things are connected—the hitching itself—is just as important. One way to measure the strength of these connections—which is to say, the sustainability of a place—is to look at how deeply they penetrate the culture.

  Aldo Leopold, reflecting on America in the mid-1900s, believed that our culture had it mostly wrong. His anthology A Sand County Almanac, published shortly after his death in 1949 and considered by many scholars to be the bible of American environmentalism, includes his now famous essay “The Land Ethic,” in which he argued that our idea of a community, prefaced on the interaction between human beings, was simply too limited. A broader definition of a sustainable community was needed to include soil, water, plants, and animals—“or collectively: the land.”

  In other words, he defined community the way the Spanish use the word tierra, viewing each component of the system the way Klaas viewed his wild plants—as so critical to the other parts, they fit together like a living pyramid:

  The bottom layer is the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores. . . . Each successive layer depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and each in turn furnishes food and services to those above.

  But Leopold was not entirely satisfied with this metaphor. Any complete understanding of the land, he argued, required an ethical component as well.

  “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics,” he wrote. Leopold saw it as our responsibility, as members of the community, to protect nature’s greatest gift: its capacity for self-renewal. “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.”

  Without an ethic, the connections invariably weaken. To Leopold’s American readers, this was a radical concept, but a sense of ethics is implicit in the culture of the dehesa. Farmers are raised to respect the land as nearly sacred ground. As Lisa told me, Spaniards find the dehesa nothing short of profoundly beautiful, in the same way that an American might find Yosemite or the Rockies beautiful—not only because it is, but because so much in their history and education tells them it is.

  “It’s very much a question of values, not just value,” Miguel explained to me. “That’s what explains how the traditional farmers and producers have behaved for generations, and why still today they put tradition, nature, or instinct before technology, choosing to produce better, not just more.”

  Today, farmers routinely plant new oaks to replenish natural loss. It’s not done for personal gain—in their own lifetimes those trees will never produce an acorn. The practice is largely based on what their parents and grandparents did before them, a tradition in line with the Mennonite belief that you start raising a child one hundred years before he is born.

  To truly see how deeply these values penetrate the culture, one need only look at what people are eating. Extremaduran food is unadorned and simple, reflecting its peasant origins and the poverty of the land.

  Start with ham. (The Spanish always do.) As Miguel explained, jamón is, in essence, a poor product. The meat is sliced paper thin. It is served sparingly. And it’s merely one preparation of one part of the pig. There are other regional embutidos (cured meats), like the morcillas (blood sausages, which come in numerous forms), lomo (cured tenderloin), and the famous chorizo. The ribs are often served in the regional variation of migas (a traditional Spanish dish
of fried day-old bread crumbs). And then there is the secreto ibérico—a prized cut of meat near the shoulder blade that is prepared simply, cooked over a high flame.

  Since great jamón cannot exist without the sheep, there are delicious uses for sheep’s milk (such as the renowned Torta del Casar and La Serena cheeses) and also the meat from older sheep once they no longer graze—caldereta de cordero is a slow braise of mutton, stewed with garlic and potatoes. The Extremaduran chanfaina is braised second cuts—brain, heart, kidneys, and liver—mixed with boiled eggs and bread crumbs.

  The abundant wildlife of Extremadura—partridge, rabbit, deer, and wild boar—are also incorporated into the cuisine, and they are often served with locally foraged mushrooms and greens. Bee populations thrive, feasting on the plant diversity to produce exceptionally sweet honey. And of course there is the local olive oil, which makes its way into almost every dish.

  The land never suffered from settlers imposing their dietary preferences on the ecology, as ours did during American settlers’ disastrous westward march across a fertile and undeveloped continent. It was just the opposite. People’s diets (as well as pigs’) evolved from, and with, the ecology.

  Eduardo’s foie gras, while not a traditional product of the region, is informed by the same set of values. It’s difficult to argue that it is a poor product. One of Eduardo’s livers costs about $700—an exorbitant price, when you compare it with the $80 Moulard livers I can buy from suppliers. And yet, as Eduardo pointed out to me, he almost never sells his livers whole. Instead he makes them into pâté (a technique owed to chef Jean-Joseph Clause, the French culinary genius awarded twenty pistols by King Louis XVI), or confits single slices, cooking them in their own fat. In this way, he can preserve them for weeks or months, whereas a fresh liver has a lifespan of a few days. And, more important, he stretches them over many servings. Eduardo’s geese require quite a lot of time and care, and copious amounts of natural feed. Stretching one liver over multiple meals—over multiple weeks—means the liver can be savored.